Would an older capture card work on a Vista PC?

[Rein Engel]

I'm interested in installing an old ATI Radeon 7500 All-in-Wonder capture card, made in 2003, on my new PC which has Vista preinstalled. Would it work?

[edDV]

The graphics display card portion is likely "to work" but not for advanced compositing features.

You will probably be the first to find out for MMC (tuner, et. al).
http://ati.amd.com/technology/windowsvista/index.html

[redwudz]

If you have a new PC, it likely will have a PCI-E video card slot instead of the AGP that was common a few years ago. Unless that's a PCI card? And Vista has some fairly high requirements for video cards if you want decent graphics performance.

[TBoneit]

The AIW Radeo 7500 would most likely be a AGP card or maybe a PCU not PCIe. The AIW 7500 is... Not a capture card it is a Video card with Video in and Video out..

[Bjs]

TBoneit

The ATI Radeon 7500 All-in-Wonder dose include video capture ... thats why it says "All-in-Wonder" .

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Would be agp 4x .

First check if new pc supports agp 4x before shoving it into the pc . Stuffing older hardware into a new system is not a clever idea .

Depending on available drivers (last known) , you'd have to think seriously of updating the card (replace it) to suite vista requirements and driver support , especially considering video capture .

Even if it works , which it should for normal display (depending on motherboard agp support) , the video capture may not work . Pretty sure it wont due to lack of drivers for older hardware ... if it dose at all , it'll be a complete dog .

To get the full Vista experience, the graphics card needs a lot of memory (64MB minimum, 128MB recommended) and must support the complete DirectX 9 API.

Based upon : http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1759,715983,00.asp

Which nails the card with poor 3d capabilities , stuck in the directx7 generation , 64mb max memory .

A friend had one before , and it just totally sucked when compared against my system fitted with the asus v6600 64mb vivo for both 3d gaming and video capture quality ... even my older asus v3300 32mb vivo beat it .

Thank you know who , I went with asus vivo's at that time (now use avermedia products) .

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Check out

https://www.videohelp.com/capturecards/ati-all-in-wonder-radeon-7500/149

[overloaded_ide]

First you probably have a AGP card and your system probably does not have any AGP slots depending what you have and how new for a system now.
Since you probably don't have a slot to put it in, end of options right there!

I'm not certain, but I think I did see a AIW PCI Card long ago, but they were not popular, so you might have a chance still.
I bought my Daughter the 7500 PCI video card for her system, I think at that time I could have got a PCI AIW but I didn't get it due to price.

I have the same card AGP and that's one reason I have not built a new system, I don't want to toss my card even though I still would not run Vista on a new system anyway, but hte new boards don't have the AGP slots!

By the way, NEW is a realitve term. It may be new as in just bought and never used before but it could still have an older style board inside. What is your system? I saw Vista being installed on systems that still had old style boards inside untill they sold out of them boards.
Is it a DELL, home built, A system from store down the road?

[Rein Engel]

This is the computer:
http://www.productshub.com/HP-Pavilion-m8013w-Media-Center-TV-AMD-Athlon-64-X2-4800-2-...-Home-Premium/

The card is PCI, and I don't even know if the PC has a slot to fit it. I haven't done anything yet, but from the sound of it, I don't want to.

My reasoning behind it is that after finally finding a program that will allow me to capture non-television sources from the on board s-video port(s), the lag when recording is tremendous. The only reason I want capturing capabilities is to record games while I'm playing them live. That's impossible when it takes three seconds for what I press on the controller to happen on screen. On my old computer, 256MB of RAM and a 1.8ghz Athlon processor, I could do this. But on this computer I can't.

So it has to be that the included graphics card isn't capable of performing to that level. My old ATI card was, so I was hoping to use that one. It was more or less a dumb idea, but a desperate one.

I guess I'm going to have to buy a new ATI card.

[edDV]

Play games on what? An external game machine or on the PC itself?

There is a difference between "recording gameplay" an putting a PC between you and the display. If just recording, why should you care what is on the PC window?

[Rein Engel]

External game machines, yeah. A lot of capture cards and programs don't take response time into consideration. As long as the audio and video are in sync, it doesn't matter if the display is a couple seconds behind the signal the machine you're using, be it a cable box or VCR, is sending.

I guess I want to do both. I want to display the game live on my monitor through a program like VirtualDub, or what I'm using now, iuVCR. At the same time I want to record what's happening.

Even without recording there is still a slight lag. Some programs are worse than others. The best was VirtualDub and the worst was the included software for the capture card, WinTV2000.

I've tried a couple of things like making sure absolutely no other programs are running and using the Windows Vista Basic color scheme but none of it helped. I also disconnected from the Internet as well, but it didn't help.

[redwudz]

It's hard to tell if that computer has a AGP slot, but I doubt it. Having DDR2 memory tells me very likely it has a PCI-E type video card, probably part of the motherboard as it shares memory. And for PCI slots, being it has on-board video and is likely a Micro-ATX motherboard, it may only have 2 PCI slots. I would look at the back of the computer. If you see 2 PCI cards in the PCI slot area, the available slots may be in use already. But if all the features are on the motherboard, still a chance for a free PCI slot.

Vista drivers are a different problem. Maybe, being that it is a ATI card, the ATI drivers are generic and some may be available that will work with the card, even with a Vista OS installed.

If you can get the side cover off, you should be able to see if it has available slots, then check with ATI for which Vista drivers they may have, that may work with your card.

But the computer has decent specifications. You might consider adding a second hard drive at some point to improve throughput a little when encoding or editing.

[Rein Engel]

How involving would it be to remove the 56k modem, which is in a PCI slot, and replace it with a capture card?

I still haven't checked to see if I have a free PCI slot, so I'm just wondering what my options would be if I end up not having one.

[overloaded_ide]

Just rip out the card and toss it if you don't need the modem.
Stick in the PCI ATI AIW and install the drivers, see what happens. Maybe the drivers you have will work, maybe not. Look at ATI to see if they have Vista drivers.

I never saw the point in recording Video games myself. Does this turn out like a movie you can sit and watch like Rambo or something???

Or are you just going to watch Mario jump around and break blocks and get whacked? LOL
I guess if you watch the Donkey Kong long enough you can figure out when to duck and when to jump HA HA

I'm not a gamer, I got better things to do with my life, I guess some of those action games maybe turn out as decent videos???

[redwudz]

Most cards in a PCI slot will be 'plug and play'. So if you remove one, the computer should just eliminate it from the menus. No real problems there.

I would check around on the ATI site to see what drivers are available. For just playback, the drivers are simple and a generic ATI driver would likely work with Vista. I just used a Catalyst driver from ATI when I had a ATI card with Vista and it worked fine. Actually Vista has a built in ATI driver that would likely work well enough for playback.

Using the same card for capture is a little different. It may take some experimenting when using an older card. I would look around ATI's site and I'm sure they will list a user forum somewhere. And with any luck, someone there has already done what you would like to do. At least you can ask.

[edDV]

All on the ATI site.

The AIW7500 isn't listed for Vista drivers


but it is for XP


http://ati.amd.com/support/driver.html
http://ati.amd.com/technology/windowsvista/index.html

[Rein Engel]

I'm not going to install the old card. There's no point in further complicating things. With that said, can anyone recommend a good PCI, Windows Vista compatible "ATI" brand capture card?

@ overloaded: Well first it was just a hobby... recording certain games. Then I fell into video editing and making music videos with game footage. After that I tried my hand at something called "speed runs" where you try to complete a game, usually classic ones, as quickly as possible and capture it for record/proof purposes.

Over the past few years I've mainly used capturing as a means of recording online gameplay sessions for proof of certain players using exploits and hacking. I've also made a couple music videos here and there, but not like I used to.

The main thing though is being able to just play on my monitor. I would open the ATI MediaCenter application, put the window up in the upper right hand corner, select "always on top" and then use an instant messenger to talk to people I was playing with/against. It was a setup I had REALLY become accustomed to, and it was convenient and time saving. I'm not the type of guy to sit down on the couch, put a gaming headset on and play a video game for hours on end. When I do play one, I just turn on the system, load MediaCenter and play for a little bit, then to get back to whatever I was doing on the computer, be it work or not, I'd just turn off the game system and close the TV application. Ten seconds and it's gone.

[ofbarea]

I did attempted installing an ATI AIW 9000 card in Vista. Since this has similar capture hardware I can tell you, yours will not work.

For ATI AIW card in Vista you will need an AIW 9600 or higher model

Because of this, I just capture to DV these days.